A civil rights struggle you may not have heard about

Proof positive that the end game for the statist-left isn't merely "equality" nor "equal access" rather equality and equal access to the same crappy status quo.


This country's Justice Department is at it again in attempting to keep children from escaping a failing public education system:

The Justice Department is trying to stop a school vouchers program in Louisiana that attempts to help families send their children to independent schools instead of under-performing public schools.

The agency wants to stop the program, led by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, in any school district that remains under a desegregation court order.

In papers filed in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, the agency said Louisiana distributed vouchers in 2012-13 to roughly 570 public school students in districts that are still under such orders and that "many of those vouchers impeded the desegregation process."

The federal government argues that allowing students to attend independent schools under the voucher system could create a racial imbalance in public school systems protected by desegregation orders.

You see, it's all about a social normative rather than parents fighting for a good education for their children. Fine-tuning fully arbitrary racial balances trumps the welfare of the children of Louisiana.


Governor Jindal called school choice a "moral imperative" and he is exactly right. We somehow manage to affix the label of "civil rights" to everything under the sun: from housing to healthcare to, yes, even public education. Yet, somehow, the struggle for black parents to afford their children a decent education away from the failed system by their own choice is not worthy this honor.


This irony may or may not be lost on this nation's political class. Frankly, we don't care. That they have formed an unholy alliance with the teachers' union to block educational opportunities for the less-well-off in our country is the only thing that matters to us.


It's readily apparent that Eric Holder, the miserable hack that runs the Justice Department, is using civil rights era legislation to create a perpetual grievance industry where the educational opportunities of minority children are sacrificed at the altar of "racial imbalances." Again, irony overload.


For the sane among us, it's always 5 o'clock somewhere and for the statist among us that views everything through a racial prism, it's always 1955 everywhere.




h/t: Powerline

Video clip of the day

Man bites dog: Blacks protesting the NAACP in Harlem

Why would the NAACP fight to keep those schools open?

I think there is an ideological affinity with the Democratic Party on education where they want more spending and more things.





The black community has a stake in keeping these education options open.

Riley and McGurn touch on something that we have noticed in the charter school battle with respect to political parties. Though we have urged the Republican party to seize this issue as it plays well with minorities as well as simply being the right thing to do, it is Democrats, if not necessarily the Democratic party that are at the forefront of this issue.

To wit: Democratic mayors and pols in rust belt and northeast/mid-Atlantic cities are doing battle with the Democratic party machinery, i.e. teachers' unions to close down these failing schools and open charters. Because of these political, geographic and demographic realities, the GOP is on the outside looking in on much of the charter school struggle.

Clean-up in K through 12....

We all tend to agree that letting the federal government run our grocery stores would be a bad idea so why then do we let it anywhere near our schools?

John Stossel on choice, competition and the Department of Education in our public schools:

(if embed no worky, please click here)

Yes, they are

The Compton Unified School District looked like an ideal target to an organization created to help parents force dramatic reforms at poorly performing schools.

For many years, the troubled school system of 26,000 students south of downtown Los Angeles has had campuses with low test scores, distracted management, a poor reputation and, its critics say, hostility to change. It also has parents dissatisfied enough with their children's education to take on the local bureaucracy.

On Tuesday, those factors came together as 85 adults and children arrived at Compton's district headquarters to present a petition signed by 62% of parents at McKinley Elementary, one of the state's worst-performing schools. The petition requires the district to turn management of McKinley over to a charter school company. Charters are independently operated public schools.

Organizers say the effort is the first to use California's new "parent-trigger" law, under which a majority of parents can force a school to shut down, replace its staff or convert to a charter.

Compton Unified has no recourse under California law, state officials said, even though McKinley's test scores have risen significantly the last two years and steadily over the last six. The school's two-year 77-point rise on the state's Academic Performance Index is among the highest in California.

Critics have characterized the parent trigger as an overly blunt, sometimes counterproductive instrument. But the effect, say supporters, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, is to put children and parents ahead of employees and interest groups.

"Giving power to the parents — this is what this is all about," Schwarzenegger said in a conference call Tuesday with reporters. The governor applauded the McKinley effort and described as "unacceptable" the education some children in the state receive. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan also praised the developments in Compton.

At district headquarters, parents chanted "Yes, we can!" as Karen Frison, acting superintendent of Compton schools, accepted the petition. Telling the group she would "do what is required by law," she declined to answer questions. (Her predecessor was recently fired over allegedly improper use of district credit cards.)

We have blogged previously about the charter school effort up in Compton and Los Angeles and with specific respect to Locke High School (home to our favorite American League slugger, Eddie Murray, while growing up) and the opposition they faced by the teachers' union and the bureaucracy.

Here is a sampling of what we wrote when Locke went charter:

This is nothing short of astounding. If the L.A. political structure, the very picture of statist conformist thinking can commit to this bold maneuver there is no telling what future possibilities are in store. Then again, maybe this speaks to the abject wretchedness of the L.A. schools that the school board essentially threw up its hands as if saying, “well, nothing else has worked”. A victory, no matter.

We also would like to note (again) how the Republicans are letting a golden opportunity slip away by not getting out in front of this growing movement. We are advised non-stop by political players and pundits that the party needs to quit being so white and that it needs to reach out to minorities. OK. Sure. But when the strategy is revealed as to how “we” Republicans are to go about doing it, it inevitably leads to embracing amnesty for illegal aliens. That’s the big idea?

To be fair to our Republican friends, it has dawned on us that it's kind of tough to be a vanguard in this movement when you don't have any boots on the ground, or perhaps, more accurately, you are not even a presence in the area.

Our desire to see the G.O.P. lead the way in the school choice/charter/voucher movement fight is blunted by the fact that these battles are taking place most significantly in the heavily-unionized areas of the north-east, rust belt and Los Angeles that are dominated by Democratic politics. It's blue on blue violence and we are pleased to see the less-statist side of this battle is prevailing.

Absent a ground game, perhaps the Republicans can take this national by having the House, in the next session, introduce legislation that would restart the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program for students in the nation's capital and which was allowed to die on the vine by the current Congress.

The G.O.P.-led Congress is going to have an awful lot on their plate come next January but this would be simply the right thing to do politically, pragmatically and morally.

A.J. Duffy advises against reading the L.A. Times

Back on Monday, we praised the L.A. Times for the work they did in exposing the outrageous salary and compensation packages garnered by the elected officials of the city of Bell, CA and then pleaded this vanguard of old media that if they were going to go down at the hands of new media, then do so in a fiery ball of 4th estate integrity and competence.

That glow you see, friends, is the L.A. Times taking on the teachers' union.

The Los Angeles teachers union president said Sunday he was organizing a "massive boycott" of The Times after the newspaper began publishing a series of articles that uses student test scores to estimate the effectiveness of district teachers.

"You're leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test," said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.

You might remember Duffy who was quite prominent in a reason.tv video we featured a while back regarding the struggles of Locke High School in Los Angeles and the reform efforts of the principal there that Duffy was doing everything in his power to thwart.

Because it provides such a stark contrast between the parents and children on one side and the teachers' union on the other, we're providing another look at the aforementioned reason.tv video below.





If embed no worky, then please, click here.

Getting outflanked?

For an illustration of just how dire our public education system is in parts of our country, consider this: Democratic mayors from traditional machine-politics cities of the Midwest, Rust Belt and the Northeast are standing up to the teachers' unions in an attempt to implement pragmatic results-oriented solutions to their towns' school districts.

During the last weeks of the term, third graders at School 58-World of Inquiry School created an oil spill in a bowl. Under the guidance of teacher Alyson Ricci, they tried to clean it up. Cotton swabs worked.

The school last year won the national Excellence in Urban Education Award, with all students meeting state proficiency rates in science and social studies. It's an exception, though, in a Rochester system where fewer than half of the 32,000 public-school students graduate on time.

Rochester Mayor Robert Duffy wants to set up more schools that produce results like World of Inquiry's. But he says the superintendent's efforts to close failing schools and open new ones have been hobbled by a school board mired in minutia. He is pushing to dissolve the elected board in favor of one appointed by the mayor and city council for a five-year test period. New York's state legislature is considering the bid.



As cities come under increasing pressure to fix failing schools, more are, like Rochester, trying to take matters into their own hands—or at least those of their mayors.

"People are desperately seeking a model that can be duplicated and used in different communities," said Jim Ardis, the mayor of Peoria, Ill., who is considering such a move. He argues that a Peoria model—yet to be developed—is more likely to fit smaller cities across the Midwest than existing systems in larger urban areas.

The school district of Boston, where mayoral control was first pioneered back in '92 has been joined by New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago, Cleveland, New Haven, Conn., and Providence, Rhode Island which are now all under mayoral control.

Of course, giving the mayor more autonomy at the expense of school boards is not going unchallenged by the school boards themselves and their allies, lawmakers at the state and municipal levels and, of course, the teachers' unions (it has been declared unconstitutional by the courts here in California, natch).

Unions say mayoral control often ushers in policies counter to teachers' interests. Cities with mayoral control often seek to award pay or decide layoffs based on performance rather than seniority. Mayors have also pushed for the opening of charter schools, which are more difficult for unions to organize than public schools.

Once again, no where do we ever see the union concede that they may not have all the answers and how they might possibly be open to trying something different that just might be in the better interests of the children. Somehow the battle cry of "it's for the children!" is strangely absent in matters that actually effect the children.

Please read the article where they go to extents to explain that there is no cut and dry nor any black and white plan to reforming the district hierarchy but only a willingness to mix it up and try something different apart a culture and mindset that is failing the children of lower and working-class families.

Side note: We have taken the Republican Party to task at every opportunity for not doing enough to get out in front of education reform, particularly in way of vouchers, school choice and charter schools. Here is a situation, though, not of their making whereby the Democrats have a simple structural advantage in that the most significant education reform battles are being waged within the ranks of the Democratic Party itself and thus, the biggest proponents of education reform will be Democrats.

No matter... all the more reason for the Republicans to get off their sorry asses and engage the opposition in the education reform debate. It's doing right by the children, it's electorally-favorable with minorities and it cheezes-off the unions. Tell us again what we're missing here?

Quote of the day

“I’m not a Milton Friedman, I just think kids are getting screwed by a system that’s horrible. ”

That from liberal activist Eva Moskowitz who is taking on one of the most powerful and brutal unions in America, the New York City teachers' union.

Moskowitz served on the New York City Council as chairwoman of the education board and earned the wrath of the union by having the temerity of subjecting the contracts of teachers, principals and even janitors to public scrutiny.

The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), got its revenge by defeating her in 2005 in her bid to become Manhattan borough president. Undaunted in her quest for giving kids a decent education, she is now the CEO of Harlem Success Academy, a network of four - soon to be seven - charter schools in that famed inner city neighborhood.

Almost all of Harlem Success’s students are black or Latino, and three-quarters qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. Last year, 100 percent of Harlem Success’s third-graders passed the standardized state math exam, and 95 percent passed the English test, far outpacing the local school districts and ranking the school 32nd among all of New York state’s 3,500 public schools.

For Moskowitz, it’s the result of “high behavioral and high academic expectations.” For her critics, it’s another reason to hate her. The union imports activists to protest her schools. Last year, a charming mob greeted Harlem Success children arriving for the first day of school with chants of “Don’t be fooled, abort charter schools.”

Harlem Success and the attendant union thuggery is now the subject of a documentary, The Lottery, so named because of the demand for the Academies. Newark, New Jersey mayor, Corey Booker said he can no longer attend such events for the heartbreak of families not winning acceptance to these types of charter schools (Incidentally, we've seen Booker on T.V. a couple of times. Impressive dude. He represents what we hope is a new breed of big/mid-size city Democratic pols who aren't beholden to the unions, machine politics nor ideology but rather pragmatism. Hell, if Al Sharpton can come out in favor of charter schools and former California Assembly speaker Willie Brown warns of the unsustainability of public pension funds then anything is possible).

Check out trailer for the movie below.



Wow.


Again, how big GOP can't seem to get itself organized by backing school choice/vouchers and charter schools is beyond us (and this is where the GOP lacks Jack Kemp's vision). For all the hand wringing the Republican pols do about wanting to win over minorities, here is the perfect opportunity as supporting efforts like Harlem Success is a) absolutely the right thing to do, b) is electoral gold with minorities and c) will completely piss off the unions.

What's not too like about all that?

Choice for thee but not for ye.

You think these two moms would like an opportunity to have their children sit next to Sasha and Malia Obama in school?


We realize there are some other pressing legislative matters currently but the Republicans have traditionally done an outstanding job of punting on the issue of school choice/vouchers, an issue, unlike pandering on immigration reform, can make real inroads with minorities.

Having said that we give all the credit in the world to the Democrats who have been active of late on the school voucher front by hosing over Washington D.C. schoolchildren by killing Washington D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship program in a recent spending bill.

When the teachers’ union cracks the whip, the Democrats make the trip.

B-Daddy has more here.

And some more of our thoughts on school choice and vouchers, here.

If it can happen in L.A., it can happen anywhere.

We’re a little late to the party on this one and we take full blame for it but we will cop also to the plea of undercoverage because this did seem to fly under the radar a bit.

We blogged previously on the successful efforts to make Locke High School in Los Angeles a charter school (Reason.tv clip on same subject is contained in post) and just a little over a month ago the L.A. Unified School District board voted 6-1 to pass a resolution that would make 250 of LAUSD’s 800 schools eligible to become charter schools which reason.tv covers here.



If embed no worky, please click here.

This is nothing short of astounding. If the L.A. political structure, the very picture of statist conformist thinking can commit to this bold maneuver there is no telling what future possibilities are in store. Then again, maybe this speaks to the abject wretchedness of the L.A. schools that the school board essentially threw up its hands as if saying, “well, nothing else has worked”. A victory, no matter.

We also would like to note (again) how the Republicans are letting a golden opportunity slip away by not getting out in front of this growing movement. We are advised non-stop by poltical players and pundits that the party needs to quit being so white and that it needs to reach out to minorities. OK. Sure. But when the strategy is revealed as to how “we” Republicans are to go about doing it, it inevitably leads to embracing amnesty for illegal aliens. That’s the big idea?

We will say again that championing the charter school movement is a political as well as a societal winner as it will demonstrate a commitment to the education of minority youths of which their voting-aged parents seem to support in by solid majorities.

That the GOP would have the common sense to act upon such an opening.

Video clip of the day

Last month, a group of anti-government extremist types gathered in the nation’s capitol to protest Federal intervention into matters of personal choice. Their struggle is documented in a reason.tv clip below.



If embed no worky, please click here.

Why?

Well let’s see: it's cheaper and unlike the public education system in that neck of the woods, it actually works. That should effectively end the argument.



"Everything else (that) they could've shut down... they take this one away."